tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8337378552271280852024-03-13T19:45:58.442-07:00The Recycled CinemaEli Horwatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05187714004486249366noreply@blogger.comBlogger77125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-833737855227128085.post-12877636259403111612010-03-05T09:06:00.000-08:002010-03-05T09:30:34.266-08:00European Media Art Festival and Mark BoswellThis year "mash-up" is the theme of the <a href="http://www.emaf.de/index.php?id=70&L=2">European Media Art Festival</a> in Osnabrück. If you happen to be in lower Saxony between April 21st and 25th you might drop by.<br /><br />Also, drop into Mark Boswell's site <a href="www.novakino.com">Novakino</a> for some beautiful and hallucinatory videos that are equal parts Vertov and Debord. More to come on these soon.Eli Horwatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05187714004486249366noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-833737855227128085.post-59896999035580214922010-03-03T14:56:00.000-08:002010-03-03T14:58:41.691-08:00SCOPE Film Journal: Cultural BorrowingsMy taxonomy of digital remixing and contemporary found footage practice on the Internet was just published by Nottingham University's Scope Online Film Journal. The entire issue is devoted to "Cultural Borrowings" and details some of the presentations of a conference I attended several years ago in the UK. Happy readings!<br /><br />http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/cultborr/chapter.php?id=8Eli Horwatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05187714004486249366noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-833737855227128085.post-89957036715748312732010-03-02T20:31:00.000-08:002010-03-02T20:34:23.100-08:00York Appropriation Conference<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_XbXPJeM56B8/S43mlHIp-tI/AAAAAAAAA1M/w-EeNayZKGs/s1600-h/Picture+2.png"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 138px; height: 200px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_XbXPJeM56B8/S43mlHIp-tI/AAAAAAAAA1M/w-EeNayZKGs/s200/Picture+2.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5444261049805699794" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_XbXPJeM56B8/S43miJeFLrI/AAAAAAAAA1E/ulBsmsmiL7k/s1600-h/Picture+1.png"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 138px; height: 200px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_XbXPJeM56B8/S43miJeFLrI/AAAAAAAAA1E/ulBsmsmiL7k/s200/Picture+1.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5444260998892826290" border="0" /></a><br />On Friday March 19th, I'll be delivering a paper titled "Intermedial Strategies of Appropriation in Art and Found Footage Practices" at the York Art History Department's Appropriation conference. For more info, see the posters below.Eli Horwatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05187714004486249366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-833737855227128085.post-70582999455243353162010-03-02T20:16:00.000-08:002010-03-02T20:17:09.274-08:00(In)appropriation Festival in LA*********CALL FOR ENTRIES!**** *****<br /><div class="gmail_quote"><br />CALL FOR ENTRIES:<br /><br /><span>Los Angeles</span> Filmforum invites film and videomakers to take part in the 2010 FESTIVAL OF (IN)<span class="il">APPROPRIATION</span>.<br /><br />WHO: All film and videomakers<br />WHAT: Call for entries for the Festival of (In)<span class="il">appropriation</span><br />WHEN: Entries must be received by <span style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(0, 102, 204); background: transparent none repeat scroll 0% 0%; -moz-background-clip: border; -moz-background-origin: padding; -moz-background-inline-policy: continuous;">May 15, 2010</span>.<br /> WHERE: Send submissions to Jaimie Baron, 10480 National Blvd. #308, Los Angeles, CA 90034<br />PRESENTED BY: Los Angeles Filmforum<br /><br />Santa suit in July? Brussel sprouts for breakfast? Cat in the bathtub? Fish on a bicycle? All of these things are possible, but they are just "not done." At least, in our view, not often enough! Of course, the notion of what is "appropriate" always depends on context – the right time and the right place. What is permissible in one context may not be so in another. Indeed, the "inappropriate" is all about what is in the "wrong" place and at the "wrong" time, which is exactly where we think it should be. Mash-up, machinima, remix, collage, compilation, found footage, détournement – these terms all refer to films and videos that tear materials from one (con)text and place them in another, constantly questioning the limits of what is "appropriate. " At its best, this act of (in)<span class="il">appropriation</span> may produce revelation that leads viewers to reconsider the relationship between past and present, here and there, truth and lie, intention and subversion.<br /><br />With that idea in mind, Los Angeles Filmforum invites submissions for the 2010 Festival of (In)<span class="il">appropriation</span> – our third festival! We are open to all works that appropriate film or video footage and repurpose it in "inappropriate" ways. We will consider both films and videos, including works that are made up entirely of found footage and those that only use small segments of appropriated material. We are especially interested in – but certainly not limited to – films that put history into question and films that explore the ways in which digital technologies are reconstructing our relationship to preexisting audiovisual materials. Particular consideration will be given to films that repurpose materials in an inventive way and to films that are under <span>20 minutes</span> long. We will only accept work finished in 2008 or later.<br /><br /><span style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(0, 102, 204);">The Festival</span> of (In)<span class="il">appropriation</span> will take place at in Fall 2010, specific date TBA.<br />Curated by Jaimie Baron and Madeleine Gallagher.<br /><br />Guidelines:<br />• Submission deadline: <span style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(0, 102, 204);">May 15, 2010</span><br />• Please send all submissions in DVD format to: Jaimie Baron, 10480 National Blvd. #308, Los Angeles, CA 90034<br />• Submissions must be 20 minutes or less and must contain some form of "(in)<span class="il">appropriation</span>. "<br />• Acceptable submission formats: DVD and VHS<br />• Acceptable exhibition formats: mini-DV, DV-Cam, <span>16mm film</span>, <span style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(0, 102, 204);">35mm film</span>, DVD (but discouraged, since DVD is not a reliable projection medium).<br /> • Please include: title, filmmaker, running time, a 30-word or less synopsis, and contact information (phone and email).<br />• No submission fee, but please send only good films!<br /><br />Los Angeles Filmforum is the city's longest-running organization dedicated to weekly screenings of <span style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(0, 102, 204);">experimental film</span> and <span style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(0, 102, 204);">video art</span>, documentaries, and experimental animation.<br /> <br />For more information, please go to: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.lafilmforum.org/" target="_blank"><span>http://www.lafilmforum.org/</span></a> </div>Eli Horwatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05187714004486249366noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-833737855227128085.post-87467419761315567292009-12-19T09:54:00.000-08:002010-01-31T13:55:21.114-08:00Patterns of CollectionI have previously discussed some tendencies of experimental filmmakers to rigorously construct patterns of images usually related to a prominent trope in cinema. For a good example, see Volker Schreiner's amazing film "Counter" below. <br /><br /><object width="410" height="341" id="veohFlashPlayer" name="veohFlashPlayer"><param name="movie" value="http://www.veoh.com/static/swf/webplayer/WebPlayer.swf?version=AFrontend.5.4.8.1005&permalinkId=v1002890Hrm8XHBp&player=videodetailsembedded&videoAutoPlay=0&id=anonymous"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.veoh.com/static/swf/webplayer/WebPlayer.swf?version=AFrontend.5.4.8.1005&permalinkId=v1002890Hrm8XHBp&player=videodetailsembedded&videoAutoPlay=0&id=anonymous" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="410" height="341" id="veohFlashPlayerEmbed" name="veohFlashPlayerEmbed"></embed></object><br /><font size="1">Watch <a href="http://www.veoh.com/browse/videos/category/entertainment/watch/v1002890Hrm8XHBp">Counter By Volker Schreiner</a> in <a href="http://www.veoh.com/browse/videos/category/entertainment">Entertainment</a> | View More <a href="http://www.veoh.com">Free Videos Online at Veoh.com</a></font><br /><br /> This tendency has become a significant part of digital remixes in the past year demonstrating a rigorous form of collection, repetitive editing and exhaustive archeology of popular media. A recent example:<br /><br /><object width="560" height="340"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Vxq9yj2pVWk&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Vxq9yj2pVWk&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="560" height="340"></embed></object><br /><br /> Many appropriation artists are first and foremost, collectors. The materials collected, their visibility in popular culture and the modes of transformation implemented by the artist all help to characterize their approach to appropriation. Joseph Cornell was well known for his elaborate collections of found objects—ordered in numbered and catalogued boxes and reconstructed into archival boxes themselves turned into art objects. Critic Jodi Hauptman characterizes Joseph Cornell’s artistic career as a form of “image search” or new form of portraiture utilizing “exploration, research [and] collection” (Hauptman 1). Cornell’s interest in cinema revolved around the actress-muses that found their way into his box assemblages, collages and subsequent found footage films. <br /> <br /> While much could be made of Cornell’s obsessive fascination with Hollywood actresses Hedy Lamarr, Rose Hobart, Lauren Bacall and Greta Garbo to name a very few, more interesting is his method of collection. Cornell produced dossier folders of images and trinkets, some literal and others highly personal and oblique, which reminded Cornell of these individuals. He engaged in research in order to link actresses to historical figures by weaving invented stories. Cornell was also deeply interested in presentation, creating archives and “romantic museums” to commemorate his obsessions. Hauptman suggests that, “In his dedication to preservation and his labors as an archivist, he is less a surrealist and more a historian” (Hauptman 37). <br /> Much of Cornell’s work can be understood as a sophisticated method of interrogating popular images and fostering of an individual mysticism and alchemy of everyday objects. In this way, Hauptman describes Walter Benjamin as being in harmony with Cornell’s ideas on collection. She writes:<br /><br />Cornell’s activities call to mind Walter Benjamin, a figure who similarly turned his attention to history and to the survivors of the past. Benjamin’s interests—book collecting, childhood, the city, miniatures, the nineteenth century, photography, flanerie, the trivial and shabby—parallel Cornell’s own. In the artist’s archival accumulation of texts, quotations, and images, Cornell resembles Benjamin at work on his Arcades Project, a “materialist philosophy of history” that excavates Paris (Hauptman 37). <br /><br />The connection between these two thinkers also leads back to the surrealist movement, as indicated by Hal Foster in Compulsive Beauty. Described as an uncanny form of found object, the ruin, referred to as the “romantic ruin,” strikes an “auratic register and represents a “displaced” object that has been “outmoded” by capitalist production. Assigning value to this outmoded object is a form of détournement to Foster (Compulsive Beauty 127) who sees the collection of such objects existing outside of capitalist production as a subversion of that process. The romantic ruin is emphasized by the Surrealists because it is seen to “redeem the outmoded and to mock the mechanical-commodified” (Foster, Compulsive Beauty 127). The “romantic ruin” described by the Surrealists and later by Benjamin, is echoed in the language of Cornell when describing the “flotsam and jetsam...” of found objects (Hauptman 21). Like Benjamin’s penchant for a critical montage of quotes in the Arcades Project, Cornell “began to see his collecting…as a viable, if not critical, form of art-making” (Hauptman 22). Part of Cornell’s impetus towards manufacturing boxes from ephemera, was to turn the found detritus he had collected into something that could, in his own words “transcend the dustheap & ruthlessness of time” (Hauptman 3). <br /> <br />Cornell’s fascinations, however, do not account for what motivated his obsession with cinema. As an aesthetic form, Hauptman suggests that Cornell’s “flanerie” extended to the cinema and that the fleeting images and objects he collected on the streets were replicated by the camera. Cornell’s fascination with maps and the flaneur also link him to the Situationists. Cornell’s “Souvenirs for Singleton” box, made for actress Jennifer Jones, was a map made from detritus which is reminiscent of a chronologically simultaneous image, “Discours sur les passions de l’amour,” by Guy Debord, which offers a psychogeographic guide through Paris with map fragments united by red arrows. One of the connections between the flaneur and the person undertaking a dérive , is the goal of both “to find.” The recovery of objects is frequently associated with the pedestrian strolling through the city and coming upon some discarded artifact of overlooked importance. Collage itself is described as a kind of artistic corollary of the views of the city walker. Hauptman writes “In its accumulative structure, collage visualizes the city’s temporal layering.” She invokes Rosalind Krauss’ contention that collage is a form of image reading that focuses on duration—“the kind of extended temporality that is involved in experiences like memory, reflection, narration, proposition.” (Hauptman 153) William Burroughs suggests that collages, or as he called them, “cut-ups” resembled the human mind’s perceptual approach to the world. He wrote, “the cut-up is much closer to the actual facts of perception. As soon as you look out the window, look around the room, walk down the street, your consciousness is being cut by random factors. Life is a cut-up…rather than a straight linear narrative” (Burroughs, quoted in the film William S. Burroughs: Commissioner of Sewers). In this way, we might see collage as an attempt to reproduce the reality of the city dweller, walking down a busy urban street. <br /><br />The search for moving images by remixers often takes place on YouTube, which allows Internet spectators to search through videos by clicking other videos associated through key-words, users and actual video responses. This allows for YouTube users to scroll through videos without creating new search terms and, in effect, drift through the digital archive the site provides. This pattern of spectatorship, which promotes an aimless drift, a discovery of images and reuse of those materials re-imagines the urban derive as a stroll through the spaces of a digital archive. <br /> <br />The appropriation artist and avant-garde musician Christian Marclay was deeply influenced by artist Bruce Conner and employed found images in his visual artworks for years before moving into the cinematic milieu. However, unlike Conner, Marclay was interested in using recognizable materials rather than ephemeral industrial or educational films. Critic Jennifer Gonzales suggests, “For Marclay, it is crucial that the films he uses are recognizable, that they spark a memory in the viewers who see them. The individual film clips are not merely archival, they parallel our memories of them” (Gonzales 63). The importance of recognizable materials to these artists cannot be overstated. Part of the pleasure of the spectator when viewing these materials is experiencing the nostalgia and memories they elicit in the spectator. <br /> <br />In terms of appropriation, Marclay has said that “To be totally original and to start from scratch always seemed futile. I was more interested in taking something and making it mine through manipulation” (Seliger 136). All of these strategies come to paint a picture of the artist as collector and archivist. Hal Foster suggested, “the classic site of the surrealist dérive” was “the flea market…” (Foster, Compulsive Beauty 159); a site that Marclay explores in his own work. Jennifer Gonzales suggests that though “nearly all of Marclay’s works rely upon readymade images, objects or texts, they can also be called ‘archival’” (Gonzales 56). She argues that Marclay is overwhelmingly dealing with historical and cultural memory—inscribing new meanings onto the work through his transformation of the materials. Sometimes the materials are simply curated—as in his piece Arranged and Conducted (1997) in which Marclay “arranged, with frames abutting, more than a hundred prints, drawings, paintings and photographs drawn from the permanent collection of the Kunsthaus, each depicting a musical event.” (Gonzales 57) These materials have not been altered—they have been dropped into a new context, yes, but the overwhelming sense is that they have been selected and organized anew. <br /> <br />Once digital media became the paradigm of home spectatorship and editing, moving image appropriators could transform materials with a newfound ease and on a larger scale. Christian Marclay has produced three significant works appropriating mainstream images and sounds with the use of digital video. Marclay’s three major film works, Telephones (1995), Up and Out (1998) and Video Quartet (2002), are compiled from recognizable films edited based on an organizing principal Marclay has set out to explore. In Telephones, Marclay has constructed a “seemingly plausible linear dialogue between historically (and spatially) unrelated characters” (Higgs 88) by appropriating clips from mostly Hollywood films of actors on telephones. Up and Out uses the images of Antonioni’s film Blow Up (1966) and blends the film with the soundtrack to Brian De Palma’s homage to the film, Blow Out (1981). His most ambitious work, Video Quartet, features over 700 DVD clips from films of actors “playing instruments, singing or making noise” (Higgs 88). The film is a quadriptych, featuring four simultaneous screens that are expertly arranged to create a seemingly cohesive soundtrack. The grouping of multiple sounds has features “akin to that of a hip-hop DJ,” (Higgs 89) with the pleasant collision of sounds from disparate source materials. These works often feature the exploration of film clichés or frequently employed film motifs—the dramatic telephone conversation or the café piano player. <br /> <br />This kind of archeology of repetition in film scenes has permeated both contemporary avant-garde films and digital remixes on the Internet. In German artist Matthias Müller’s found footage film Home Stories (1990), women from disparate Hollywood melodramas go through the same series of actions—answering a phone, receiving dramatic information, running down a lavish flight of stairs and grabbing their coat and fleeing outside. Müller also enacted similar patterns of collecting with his epic Phoenix Tapes (1999), which examines numerous Alfred Hitchcock films. <br /> These patterns of collection and ordering of archives is a stalwart feature of found footage today. German video artist and essay filmmaker Harun Farocki’s Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades (2006) is a twelve channel video installation building upon the first Lumière Brothers’ film “Workers Leaving the Factory” (1895). The installation goes through eleven decades of cinema and appropriates scenes of factory workers leaving work. In the digital remixing community these patterns of collection appear often though in many cases without the implicit political concerns observed by Farocki. In his writing, Farocki has justified this form of collecting in his call for “An Archive for Visual Concepts.” <br /> <br />Many digital remixers catalog repetition in films through humorous reconstructions of tropes into a new ensemble. In Augart Media’s remix Crash (2008), images of car crashes and car explosions are assembled into pulsating rhythmic crescendos. The remixer transforms Hollywood’s overwrought love affair with automotive destruction into densely layered percussive experiments which reveal an incredible attention to detail and a highly patient and disciplined editor. Augart assembles other experiments by exploring screams, parades and war film images. One of his most ambitious works, YouTube Symphony (2009) is strikingly similar to Christian Marclay’s Video Quartet. In this work, Augart lifts YouTube clips from amateur musicians and layers them to construct his own experimental music piece. <br /> <br />The remixer AMDS, by far one of the most adept editors in the remix community, documents the use of black sunglasses as a device for imparting mystique onto characters in the remix Black Glasses (2007). The video utilizes hundreds of clips in which mostly male action heroes put-on or take-off sunglasses with a focus on the gestural continuity between each film. Unlike political remixers, AMDS does not construct a visible critique onto the materials he appropriates, but rather celebrates these films and their characters. A figure highly regarded in the remix community because of his seamless integration of multiple film images, AMDS is unlike other remixers who construct relationships between films through montage as mash-ups do. Instead, AMDS is a collage remixer, putting multiple films into the same image. In Neo Vs. Robocop (2007) the editor masterfully places both characters (including Charles Bronson’s character from Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) and Yoda from the Star Wars (1977) films into the same frame. This kind of work, which celebrates films rather than critiques them, is discussed (albeit in an art context) by Hal Foster, who is concerned with appropriations that merely reproduce images rather than engages critically with them. In the last chapter of his book Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics, Foster addresses appropriations which reveal a “fetishism of the signifier” or an uncritical passion for the materials appropriated (Foster, Recodings 175). This work might be a prime example of such a fetishism of spectacle and celebration of Hollywood semiotics, which does not possess an implicit critique. <br />The examples above imply that the collection and ordering of archival images only occurs on a superficial level in digital remixes and do not necessarily consider the implications of the frequency of such images. But this criticism applies widely in the digital remixing community; remixers are more prone to making observations about cinema rather than examining what the prevalence of certain images might signify. This of course, does not apply to the entirety of the community.Eli Horwatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05187714004486249366noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-833737855227128085.post-20004276551839921002009-11-06T15:56:00.001-08:002010-02-28T07:38:02.724-08:0030 years of unconventional camera movements from the Vtape collectionFor those of you in Toronto, this looks pretty great. Forwarded message below:<br /><br />Dear Friends of Vtape<br /><br />As many of you know, for over a decade, Vtape has developed an intensive and multi-faceted intern programme for students and members of the interested public. We are very happy to support all your future endeavors and provide as many opportunities as we can within our facilities.<br /><br />Dragging my video camera down the front steps: 30 years of unconventional camera movements from the Vtape collection provides a showcase for the curatorial research of one of our recent - and longest serving – technical interns, John Shipman.<br /><br />Shipman says this of his intriguing selection: “Eight short videos, from 1974 to 2004, playfully use unusual camera positions and movements to create a slightly different visual gravity, showing things improbable, but viscerally informative."<br /><br />The opening screening will be on Saturday November 21 from 2pm-4pm. The screenings will be at 2:00pm and 3:30pm with a curator's talk at 3:00pm.<br /><br />Dragging my video camera down the front steps: 30 years of unconventional camera movements from the Vtape collection.<br />Saturday November 21 2009<br />Screening at 2& 3:30pm, Curator talk at 3:00pm<br />Curator will be present!<br /><br />This installation will run until December 19 2009.<br /><br /><script type="text/javascript"><br />var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");<br />document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));<br /></script><br /><script type="text/javascript"><br />try {<br />var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-13268596-1");<br />pageTracker._trackPageview();<br />} catch(err) {}</script>Eli Horwatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05187714004486249366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-833737855227128085.post-82307817005819341502009-10-28T20:52:00.000-07:002009-10-28T20:53:08.744-07:00Hal Foster @ OCADALK | OCAD | Hal Foster | NOV 3<br />------------------------------<div style="word-wrap: break-word;"><wbr>------------------------------<wbr>------------<br />Nomadic Resident Hal Foster presents<br />a free public talk at OCAD:<br />"How To Survive Civilization, Or What Dada Can Still Teach Us"<br />Tuesday, November 3, 7:30 p.m.<br /><br />Ontario College of Art & Design<br />Auditorium, 100 McCaul Street, Toronto<br />416-977-6000 | <a href="http://www.ocad.ca/" target="_blank">www.ocad.ca</a><br /><br />OCAD is pleased to welcome internationally acclaimed author<br />Hal Foster as the next resident of its Nomadic Residents<br />program, generously supported by the Jack Weinbaum Family<br />Foundation. Foster will be in residence at OCAD from<br />November 2 to 6, and will deliver a free public talk on Tuesday,<br />November 3 at 7:30 p.m.<br /><br />Widely considered one of postmodernism’s founding theorists,<br />Foster has participated urgently in the critical and historical<br />investigation of avant-garde art for almost thirty years,<br />producing a body of writing that has informed the practices of<br />many contemporary artists. He draws from a wide range of<br />intellectual traditions to illuminate the continuities and ruptures<br />in the avant-garde’s critiques of art and society, exposing its<br />underlying historical and institutional frameworks while<br />assessing its continuing relevance.<br /><br />Foster is the Townsend Martin 1917 Professor and Chair, Art &<br />Archaeology, at Princeton University, where he teaches<br />modernist and contemporary art and theory and the graduate<br />proseminar in methodology. In addition, he works with the<br />programs of Media and Modernity and European Cultural<br />Studies as well as with the School of Architecture. His<br />publications include The Anti-Aesthetic (1983), Pop Art (2005),<br />Art Since 1900 (2005), Prosthetic Gods (2004) and Design and<br />Crime (2002). A recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, Foster<br />is an editor for October, and continues to write regularly for<br />Artforum, London Review of Books, The Nation, and The New<br />Left Review.<br /><br />All are welcome; admission is free. Limited seating available;<br />guests are advised to arrive early.<br /><a href="http://www.ocad.ca/" target="_blank">http://www.ocad.ca</a></div>Eli Horwatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05187714004486249366noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-833737855227128085.post-19333659535514366552009-10-04T18:23:00.000-07:002009-10-04T18:24:30.697-07:00Pleasure Dome CallCALL | Pleasure Dome | New Toronto Works Show 2010 | DUE: JAN 15 2010<br />------------------------------<div style="word-wrap: break-word;"><wbr>------------------------------<wbr>------------<br />Pleasure Dome is seeking short experimental film/video works,<br />expanded cinema performances and media art installations<br />produced within the last year by Toronto-based artists for the<br />annual New Toronto Works Show. Now in its sixteenth year, this<br />members-curated programme features the cutting edge of<br />experimental film and video produced in Toronto today.<br />Please send preview tape/DVD or film (Super 8 or 16mm) or<br />short outline of proposed performance or installation to:<br /><br />Pleasure Dome<br />195 Rushton Rd.<br />Toronto, ON M6G 3J2<br /><br />or drop off to<br />Vtape<br />401 Richmond St. West, #452<br />Toronto<br />* note: Vtape is closed for holidays Dec 19- Jan 4 so no drop off<br />between those dates<br /><br />The New Toronto Works Show will be presented in March as<br />part of the Winter 2010 season.<br /><a href="http://www.pdome.org/wordpress/" target="_blank">http://www.pdome.org/<wbr>wordpress/</a><br /><span style="color:#888888;"><div> <span style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><div style="word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><div style="word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><div>--</div></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></div></span></div></span></div></span></div>Eli Horwatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05187714004486249366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-833737855227128085.post-43196280110664403102009-09-19T16:21:00.000-07:002009-09-19T16:22:04.870-07:00Call for SubmitionsTrinity Square Video: Call for SubmissionsDeadline: November 15th, 2009<br />Trinity Square Video (TSV) has a long history of supporting and presenting video-based works that are mediated by images of protest and activism, providing a space to explore the range of meaning that can be generated from such imagery. Our upcoming programming will build from this history. In the fall of 2009, TSV will begin an extended investigation of the current state of political engagement in contemporary art by exhibiting works that question the motivations, objectivity and ethics found in and around political representations.TSV is eager to hear from artists and curators working with video and video installation who are rigorously invested in enriching and expanding the field of socially critical visual and media-based art. We are looking for dynamic video and video-based artworks that are engaged with varying forms of contemporary politics in unexpected or unconventional ways.We are seeking innovative artist's works that use video, its forms and its processes, to examine the modes of presentation found in activist gesture, social action or cultural critique. We intend to offer a wide range of video programs and installations: from those that feature direct activist gestures to those that call into question the relationship between aesthetic value and the promotion of social causes. TSV is an artist-run resource for the production, education and dissemination of video by artists and community organizations. Since 1971, TSV has made access to the means of communication its priority, providing a diverse community of video practitioners media-arts related development through workshops, seminars and classes, as well as offering a space for the creation and exhibition of video-based images. Through its public programming, TSV has advanced the understanding and appreciation of media works produced by various community-based groups and numerous internationally recognized artists, such as Michael Balser, John Greyson, Vera Frenkel, Richard Fung, Nancy Nicol, and Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak. In recent years, TSV has presented works by Sara Angelucci, Jeremy Blake, Deanna Bowen, Manon De Pauw, Isabelle Hayeur and Éric Raymond, Nelson Henricks, Gunilla Josephson, Jude Norris, 640 480 Collective, among many others. Submission Requirements:1. One DVD with a maximum of 10 minutes of previous and/or proposed work.* 2. Written proposal (1-page)3. Artist's Statement (1-page)4. Curriculum Vitae5. Self-addressed, stamped envelope for return of support material.***DVDs can be supplemented with up to 10 digital slides on CD-ROM (Mac compatible, .jpg images only, no folders, all images must be listed with slide number, artist's last name, title of work and year, eg. 01_smith_untitled_2009.jpg).**Support material will not be returned without a SASE.Submissions must be postmarked no later than November 15th. If this date falls on a weekend or statutory holiday, the deadline moves to the next business day.Submissions will not be accepted electronically. A floorplan of the TSV Gallery is available at <a href="http://www.trinitysquarevideo.com/">www.trinitysquarevideo.com</a> We encourage proposals from emerging to established artists and curators. We firmly support the equitable remuneration of artists. TSV pays all of it exhibiting artists in accordance with the CARFAC fees schedule. Our exhibitions are presented for 4 to 5 weeks. We will accept proposals by curators for single-night screenings. If you have any questions, please contact Jean-Paul Kelly, Programming Director at <a href="mailto:programming@trinitysquarevideo.com">programming@trinitysquarevideo.com</a>, or 416-593-1332. Please send submissions to: Jean-Paul KellyProgramming DirectorTrinity Square Video401 Richmond Street West, Suite 376Toronto, ON, CanadaM5V 3A8<br /> TSV gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council and Toronto Arts CouncilEli Horwatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05187714004486249366noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-833737855227128085.post-25261854818082104672009-08-28T09:05:00.000-07:002009-08-28T09:41:12.643-07:00The New CharterI'm back, fresh after completing and defending my thesis "The Work of Art in the Age of [Ctrl]-C: Digital Remixing and Contemporary Found Footage Film Practice." This 120 page tome was primarily devoted to drawing linkages between avant-garde found footage film aesthetics, the practices of the Soviet re-editors and the explosion of digital remixes on the Internet. During that period, this blog focused primarily on the American avant-garde and digital remixing on the net. That phase is now over and I will be continuing my research in some new directions.<br /><br />First, I will be focusing more on contemporary video art, photography and other new media and practices of recycling, appropriation and adaptation. It will take some time to build the site to reflect these new directions, so I appreciate any advice, links, artists to watch and relevant news to post. I am moving into my Ph.D. at York University and am (at this juncture) looking at discourses and strategies of appropriation in contemporary art.<br /><br />Second, I will focus less on simply posting videos and more on theories and philosophies of appropriation. I am also interested in manifestos, interviews, artists’ statements and reviews.<br /><br />Third, I'm very interested in being a part of the larger network of individuals researching copyright issues, digital remixing and found footage film practice. I'm happy to link to other sites you either run or frequent and will take emails through my contact or in comments.<br /><br />Because the blog is engineered to represent a chronological and continuous record of research as opposed to websites which are ordered by topic, I will also be updating recent gallery or museum openings around the US and Canada as I become aware of them. Anyone interested in publicizing events related to appropriation in art, film and video can email me.<br /><br />Long Live the Recycled Cinema!<br /><br />EliEli Horwatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05187714004486249366noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-833737855227128085.post-38307023505951154812009-04-20T16:08:00.000-07:002009-04-20T16:20:30.903-07:00New WorkSorry I've been gone for so long. I'm finishing my thesis. Some great new work to send your way:<br /><br />Below is <span style="font-size:100%;"><span email="funkyke@yahoo.es">Enrique Piñuel</span></span>'s "The Dancer's Cut":<br /><object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/SYLTlcfhqCs&hl=en&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/SYLTlcfhqCs&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="344" width="425"></embed></object><br /><br />Also, check out these gorgeous videos by <span id="EpisodeDescription">Dinorah de Jesús Rodriguez <a href="http://cinesthesia.blip.tv/#1677855">here</a> and some majorly ambitious work by DDLM, <a href="http://www.vimeo.com/3209066">who describes his 4 hour (!) piece </a></span><a href="http://www.vimeo.com/3209066">"SUCHILECTRO-C°°°°</a><span id="EpisodeDescription">" as </span>a journey through frivolomental irredemption. Wow. Just wow...Eli Horwatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05187714004486249366noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-833737855227128085.post-45033367643270287332009-02-16T08:38:00.000-08:002009-02-16T08:55:21.650-08:00Nicolas BourriaudWhile I’ve been a fan of Lawrence Lessig’s passionate defense of remixing culture for years, I haven’t hailed him as its greatest spokesperson. As Lessig says in his book Free Culture after his failed defense of Eric Eldred which reached the Supreme Court: it will take more than legal arguments to defeat the repressive aspects of copyright law; judges must see the harm it can do to the spread of culture and ideas.<br /><br />To understand just how valuable appropriation is to a progressive society, there is no better and more dynamic advocate than Nicolas Bourriaud. An art theorist who seemed to shape contemporary art discourse after his book Relational Aesthetics, Bourriaud went on to write a small and now out-of-print text which has greatly benefited my understanding of approproiation as a progressive cultural phenomena.<br /><br />I am including my own thoughts and <a href="http://www.pdf-search-engine.com/nicolas-bourriaud-postproduction-pdf.html">a link to the book in PDF form</a>.<br /><br />In Relational Aesthetics, Nicolas Bourriaud explored several artists’ propensity towards dealing with “the interhuman sphere: relationships between people, communities, individuals, groups, social networks, interactivity, and so on.” (7) Postproduction follows this trajectory towards the participation of individuals in shaping new meanings from extant materials—appropriation for the purposes of transformation. Though Bourriaud acknowledges that “citation, recycling and détournement were not born yesterday; what is clear is that today certain elements and principles are reemerging as themes and are suddenly at the forefront, to the point of constituting the “engine” of new artistic practices.” (9) Though this is likely the result of the ease in which materials may be copied, altered and disseminated, Bourriaud’s focus on the moving image is telling. In my own research, I observe this as the result of shifts in media popularity (Georges Braque using newspaper, Koons using mass produced objects based on the zeitgeist of the time) and the supremacy of moving images as a means to disseminate information and entertainment.<br /><br /> First, the term postproduction is used to describe “the scrambling of boundaries between consumption and production.” (19) Though I admire the gist of Bourriaud’s term and it correctly implies the “second look” which occurs with transformed works, it does not posses the singularity of meaning terms like “found footage” or “digital remixing” have. It would be my guess that Bourriaud wanted to include a term that carried the weight of cinematic production with it but also could easily be applied to art works. Like digital remixing and remix culture in general, Bourriaud asserts that postproduction is not simply a tendency in contemporary art, but rather a new and semi-permanent culture of making art. He argues that “artists’ intuitive relationships with art history is now going beyond what we call “the art of appropriation,” which naturally infers an ideology of ownership, and moving towards a culture of the use of forms, a culture of constant activity of signs based on a collective ideal: sharing.” (9) Bourriaud locates appropriation, not as a marginal art practice but as a central motif of contemporary art. <br /><br /> Though many of Bourriaud’s descriptions of appropriation are not groundbreaking in their originality, they constitute the first book entirely dedicated to the subject that I am aware of, and he masterfully explains the key concepts. I will briefly quote several of his descriptions of how appropriation functions in contemporary art:<br /><br />“Notions of originality (being at the origin of) and even of creation (making something from nothing) are slowly blurred in this new cultural landscape marked by the twin figures of the DJ and the programmer, both of whom have the task of selecting cultural objects and inserting them into new contexts. (13)<br /><br />“Artists today program forms more than they compose them; rather than transfigure a raw element (blank canvas, clay, etc.), they remix available forms and make use of data. (17)<br /><br />“In a universe of products for sale, preexisting forms, signals already emitted, buildings already constructed, paths marked out by their predecessors, artists no longer consider the artistic field (and here one could add television, cinema, or literature) a museum containing works that must be cited or “surpassed” as the modernist ideology of originality would have it, but so many storehouses filed with tools that should be used, stockpiles of data to manipulate and present.” (17)<br /><br />“The material they manipulate is no longer primary. It is no longer a manor of elaborating a form on the basis of a raw material but working with objects that are already in circulation on the cultural market, which is to say, objects already informed by other objects.” (13)<br /><br />“To use an object is necessarily to interpret it. By using television, books, or records, the user of culture deploys a rhetoric of practices and “reuses” that has nothing to do with enunciation and therefore with language whose figures and codes may be cataloged.” (24)<br /><br />“A DJs set is not unlike an exhibition of objects that Duchamp would have described as “assisted readymades;” more or less modified products whose sequence produces a specific duration.” (38)<br /><br /> Bourriaud’s continuous invocation of both DJs and programmers seems highly applicable to the dual influences of hip-hop and computer technologies which inform digital remixing. The idea of the DJ as a curator or archivist and the programmer as a person that utilizes platforms, images and processes in an ensemble to form a new product mirrors the practice of assemblagist or collagist. Additionally, Bourriaud correctly places historical bodies of work as places to begin from by replicating those materials and altering them. One cannot help but remember Situationist artist Asger Jörn’s project to “update” paintings by simply painting over reproductions to make them “modern.” This kind of artmaking questions a teleological end to the process of creating an artwork as once supposed and constructs a new paradigm. Bourriaud says, that “The artwork is no longer an endpoint but a simple moment in an infinite chain of contributions.” (20) This kind of art making in which works are constantly revised, revisited and altered mirrors the programming algorithms for the Wiki in which a page is constantly changed (for better or worse) under the auspices of improvement over time. Briefly, I will list some of Bourriaud’s comments on the idea of collective and continuous art making:<br /><br />“To rewrite modernity is the historical task of this early Twenty-First Century; not to start at zero or find oneself encumbered by the storehouse of history, but to inventory and select, to use and download.” (93)<br /><br />“What if artistic creation today could be compared to a collective sport, far from the classical mythology of the solitary effort? “It is the viewers who make the paintings,” Duchamp once said, an incomprehensible remark unless we connect it to his keen sense of an emerging culture of use, in which meaning is born of collaboration and negotiation between the artist and the one who comes to view the work.” (20)<br /><br />“Appropriation is indeed the first stage of postproduction; the issue is no longer to fabricate an object, but to choose one among those that exist and to use or modify these according to a specific intention. Marcel Broodthaers said that “ Since Duchamp, the artist is the author of a definition” which is substituted for that of the objects he or she has chosen…If the process of appropriation has its roots in history, its narrative here will begin with the readymade, which represents its first conceptualized manifestation, considered in relation to the history of art. When Duchamp exhibits a manufactured object…as a work of the mind, he shifts the problematic of the “creative process” emphasizing the artist’s gaze brought to bare on an object instead of manual skill. He accesses that the act of choosing is enough to establish the artistic process, just as the act of fabricating, painting or sculpting does; to give a new idea to an object is already production. Duchamp thereby completes the definition of the term creation; to create is to insert an object into a new scenario, to consider it a character in a narrative. (25)<br /><br /> Here, Bourriaud hits upon one of the central themes of contemporary remixing; the curatorial and the selection process which informs many contemporary “postproduction” or found footage artworks. If we look at the major thrust of Christian Marclay’s found footage films, we observe that the emphasis is on the collection of materials rather than on their presentation. Additionally, the “artists gaze” here seems to mirror the idea of the “second look.” The artist’s “definition” of the artwork implies a kind of replacement of the original coding of the work or object which indicates the transformation made through the second look. Many contemporary modes of appropriation deal with constructing “archival interventions” in which features of the archive are reproduced to facilitate transformation in their groupings and combinations.Eli Horwatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05187714004486249366noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-833737855227128085.post-74840177851790731912009-01-22T18:13:00.000-08:002009-01-22T18:23:46.564-08:00A Brave New WorkI've often thought that the next frontier in film mash-ups lay in feature length works. Below is a trailer for one such work by Gabriele Guerra. Remember, this is the trailer for a 53 minute movie!<br /><br /><object width="480" height="295"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/8LugO0kIzSU&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/8LugO0kIzSU&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="295"></embed></object><br /><br />More incredible digital remix/found footage work from Dinorah de Jesús Rodríguez: <br /><br /><embed src="http://blip.tv/play/grZi5fQNkvhJ%2Em4v" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="320" height="270" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed> <br /><br />check out more of his incredible work here: <a href="http://cinesthesia.blip.tv/">http://cinesthesia.blip.tv/ </a><br /><br />Also, some very fun and mysterious interstellar found footage work from Man Zanas:<br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/I-FQayglBfk&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/I-FQayglBfk&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br /><br />Also, I wanted to share the call for works from the 2009 "(In) Appropriation" festival. It looks amazing and I think they may read this blog. Wooooo!<br /><br />CALL FOR ENTRIES:<br /><br />Los Angeles Filmforum invites film and videomakers to take part in the<br />2009 FESTIVAL OF (IN)APPROPRIATION.<br /><br />WHO: All film and videomakers<br />WHAT: Call for entries for the Festival of (In)appropriation<br />WHEN: Entries must be received by April 1, 2009.<br />WHERE: Send submissions to Jaimie Baron, 10480 National Blvd. #308,<br />Los Angeles, CA 90034<br />PRESENTED BY: Los Angeles Filmforum<br /><br />Whether you call it collage, compilation, found footage, detournement,<br />or recycled cinema, the incorporation of previously shot materials<br />into new artworks is a practice that has generated novel<br />juxtapositions of elements which have produced new meanings and ideas<br />that may not have been intended by the original makers, that are, in<br />other words “inappropriate.“ This act of appropriation may produce<br />revelation that leads viewers to reconsider the relationship between<br />past and present, here and there, intention and subversion.<br />Fortunately for our purposes, the past decade has seen the emergence<br />of a wealth of new sources for audiovisual materials that can be<br />appropriated into new works. In addition to official state and<br />commercial archives, vernacular archives, home movie collections, and<br />digital archives have provided fascinating source material that may be<br />repurposed in such a way as to give it new meanings and resonances.<br /><br />Thus, Los Angeles Filmforum invites submissions for a Festival of<br />(In)appropriation, open to all works that appropriate film or video<br />footage and repurpose it in “inappropriate” ways. We will consider<br />both films and videos, including works that are made up entirely of<br />found footage and those that only use small segments of appropriated<br />material. Particular consideration will be given to films that<br />repurpose materials in an inventive way and to films that are under<br />twenty minutes long. We will only accept work finished in 2006 or later.<br /><br />The Festival of (In)appropriation will take place in June 2009.<br />Curated by Jaimie Baron and Andrew Hall<br /><br />Guidelines:<br />• Submission deadline: April 1, 2009<br />• Please send all submissions in DVD format to: Jaimie Baron, 10480<br />National Blvd. #308, Los Angeles, CA 90034<br />• Submissions must be 20 minutes or less and must contain some form<br />of “(in)appropriation.“<br />• Acceptable submission formats: DVD and VHS<br />• Acceptable exhibition formats: mini-DV, DV-Cam, 16mm film, 35mm<br />film, DVD (but discouraged, since DVD is not a reliable projection<br />medium).<br />• Please include: title, filmmaker, running time, a 30-word or less<br />synopsis, and contact information (phone and email).<br />• No submission fee, but please send only good films ☺<br /><br />Los Angeles Filmforum is the city’s longest-running organization<br />dedicated to weekly screenings of experimental film and video art,<br />documentaries, and experimental animation.<br /><br />For more information, please go to: http://lafilmforum.wordpress.com/Eli Horwatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05187714004486249366noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-833737855227128085.post-54876111164982002422008-12-09T09:56:00.000-08:002008-12-09T10:06:27.941-08:00Digital Remixing from the Picket LinesThe dearth of posts as of late has had much to do with the fact that my TA Union at York University has gone on strike and I've been editing for the CUPE strike video committee. These excellent films made by activists and students can be seen at <a href="http://www.cupestrikevideo.wordpress.com">cupestrikevideo.wordpress.com</a> <br /><br />In the midst of this, renowned video artist John Greyson, whose incredible commitment to appropriation can be discerned from his film manifesto on cultural recycling "Uncut" (1997, has created a digital remix to support the strikers. <br /><br />Please watch: <br /><object width="480" height="295"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/ugL3gUPFxr4&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/ugL3gUPFxr4&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="295"></embed></object>Eli Horwatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05187714004486249366noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-833737855227128085.post-15050627751365533882008-11-08T08:57:00.000-08:002008-11-08T08:58:04.047-08:00My War with Chevrolet on Wikipedia<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_XbXPJeM56B8/SRXEoq2M45I/AAAAAAAAAJ0/9-IcLFGfXBw/s1600-h/tahoe+comment+-+ride+to+the+rapture+in+style"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 149px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_XbXPJeM56B8/SRXEoq2M45I/AAAAAAAAAJ0/9-IcLFGfXBw/s200/tahoe+comment+-+ride+to+the+rapture+in+style" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5266331542255100818" /></a><br />You may all remember my posting last year detailing Chevrolet's viral marketing campaign which spawned several hundred parodies and resulted in some very bad publicity for the company. If you don't, you can read the wikipedia post about this below. Several months ago, this page had all the details about the embarassment this caused but when I returned to the page last week it had been scrubbed. I re-entered this information and ONE DAY LATER it was scrubbed again. I think these commercials were a landmark moment for digital remixing and hope that anyone reading this now might go to the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Tahoe#The_Apprentice_make-your-own-ad_contest">Tahoe wiki page </a> and make sure the company isn't pulling more funny business. <br /><br />Thanks!<br /><br />The Apprentice make-your-own-ad contest<br /><br />The 2007 Tahoe was featured on and promoted through Donald Trump's TV series, The Apprentice, where the two teams put together a show for the top General Motors employees to learn about the new Tahoe. Also, The Apprentice sponsored an online contest in which anyone could create a commercial for the new Tahoe by entering text captions into the provided video clips; the winner's ad would air on national television. This viral marketing campaign backfired however, when hundreds of environmentally conscious parodies flooded YouTube and Chevy's website critiquing the vehicle for its low gas mileage. Though Chevrolet initially made a statement saying they would keep these adds on their site the company eventually took them off. The negative publicity that these commercials garnered eventually led many marketing and p.r. firms to question the effectiveness of user generated advertising.Eli Horwatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05187714004486249366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-833737855227128085.post-58153121239939495872008-10-14T14:29:00.000-07:002008-10-14T14:46:26.224-07:00Peter Tscherkassky and Gustav Deutsch: The Contemporary European ContingencyManufraktur (1985, Peter Tscherkassky)
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<br />Outer Space (Peter Tscherkassky)
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<br />Happy End (Peter Tscherkassky)
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<br />180º - Investigação de Gustav Deutsch (Nuno Lisboa)
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<br />Gustav Deutch- review - Borealis ´06
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<br />Eli Horwatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05187714004486249366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-833737855227128085.post-61264892554593121882008-09-11T11:41:00.000-07:002008-09-11T11:42:39.735-07:00Clash of the Political Remix Trailers<object width="464" height="388" classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000"><param name="movie" value="http://www2.funnyordie.com/public/flash/fodplayer.swf" /><param name="flashvars" value="key=4c8ed68670" /><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /><embed width="464" height="388" flashvars="key=4c8ed68670" allowfullscreen="true" quality="high" src="http://www2.funnyordie.com/public/flash/fodplayer.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed></object><div style="text-align:center;width: 464px;">See more <a href="http://www.funnyordie.com/">funny videos</a> at Funny or Die</div>Eli Horwatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05187714004486249366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-833737855227128085.post-19819422891915427692008-08-20T16:12:00.000-07:002008-08-20T16:13:18.446-07:00Digital Remixing on AppropriationA new vid on appropriation & culture jamming. wooooo!<br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/k8bnXIghYrs&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/k8bnXIghYrs&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>Eli Horwatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05187714004486249366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-833737855227128085.post-44541362616563833452008-08-18T11:24:00.000-07:002008-08-18T14:52:52.429-07:00Mondegreens, Animutation, Fanimutation and YouTube PoopSomewhere beyond experimental remixes lie a number of small, self-contained groups which promulgate their own styles and tendencies, oblivious or indifferent to the outside world’s recognition or spectatorship. One such underground exists on YouTubePoop.com where these relentlessly absurdist remixers (also known as “poopers”) trade in the bizarre and incomprehensible. A YouTubePoop video frequently uses nostalgic children’s cartoons, Internet memes, public figures and subjects them to crushing transformations and manipulations which focus of three frame forward-reversals (not unlike Martin Arnold’s method of repetition taken to extreme measures) and create jarring, atonal melodies and disconnected rhythms. These remixes are modeled on the frenetic style of contemporary television taken to their teleological end point where images fly across the screen and are sometimes barely perceivable. Titles of films are taken from the Captain Beefheart / Frank Zappa school with films called <i style="">John Conner’s Cookie Game is Up Due to Popcorn Malfunction. </i> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">On the margins of these experimental works lie remixers who have coined their own grammar and style which lie outside of any precedent set in found footage film history. These remixers trade on the humor, absurdity and unbridled originality of their works for their success. A quintessential figure in this area is Buffalax (AKA Mike Sutton), whose name has become a verb in many remixing circles after receiving over ten million views since 2008. A Buffalax film depends on humorous mondegreens (a word referring to misheard lyrics or phrases) of Indian pop music videos which are subtitled on the bottom of the screen. Sutton inventively finds English words which seem to roughly approximate the Hindustani lyrics, constructing absurd songs over hysterically kitschy videos. This mode of filmmaking stems from comedian Neil <span style="">Cicierega’s “animutations” (also known as fanimuation) in which music in languages other than English are coupled with pop-culture images, subtitled with mondegreens and composed using Adobe Flash Player.<br /><br />Below are some examples:<br /><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/ZA1NoOOoaNw&hl=en&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/ZA1NoOOoaNw&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" height="344" width="425"></embed></object><br /></p><br /><object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/G-PIhgNzMe8&hl=en&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/G-PIhgNzMe8&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" height="344" width="425"></embed></object><br /><br /><object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/GBA2zTwYe9o&hl=en&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/GBA2zTwYe9o&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" height="344" width="425"></embed></object><br /><br /><object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/cBtMg56EsqM&hl=en&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/cBtMg56EsqM&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" height="344" width="425"></embed></object>Eli Horwatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05187714004486249366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-833737855227128085.post-72982659436862135532008-07-28T13:21:00.000-07:002008-07-28T13:43:59.684-07:00Cut-Ups and MashupsAlways a bittersweet moment when you find someone's been doing what you do , but much, much better. I discovered these cut-up films from Augart Media recently and can't stop watching them. Though this format may drive some of you crazy, it has been an interesting one for me to explore. These works combine film footage and construct musical or percussive songs from it. Weird--wonderful--and a little annoying. Like Martin Arnold on speedy LSD.<br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/GGiHGKZofTo&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/GGiHGKZofTo&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/OWBsu_3LVNk&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/OWBsu_3LVNk&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Cj_LuvLwExs&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Cj_LuvLwExs&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/hVvsVx9LrSk&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/hVvsVx9LrSk&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>Eli Horwatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05187714004486249366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-833737855227128085.post-66743278680337769952008-07-10T14:41:00.000-07:002008-08-18T15:37:15.589-07:00Eat This Dow Chemical and ChevronI just re-watched "What Farocki Taught", an American remake of Farocki's film "The Inextinguishable Fire." The film is a powerful look at the factors allowing napalm production at Dow chemical. The company has been trying to revamp their image with the "human element" ad campaign. This video is a nice reminder of why they should never be forgiven for contributing to one of the most dangerous weapons of mass destruction in human history.<br /><object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/DkG9UHRhop8&hl=en&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/DkG9UHRhop8&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" height="344" width="425"></embed></object><br /><br />This campaign is strikingly similar to Chevron's "Power of Human Energy" campaign which receives an "identity correction" from one of our favorite remixers, Jonathan McIntosh. We Love you Jonathan!<br /><object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/C_dF9EjIvsA&hl=en&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/C_dF9EjIvsA&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" height="344" width="425"></embed></object>Eli Horwatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05187714004486249366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-833737855227128085.post-31945318615088951252008-07-07T17:28:00.000-07:002008-07-07T17:52:02.549-07:00BRUCE CONNER (1933-2008)<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://blog.cmoa.org/CI08/artists/CONNER%20portrait.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 200px;" src="http://blog.cmoa.org/CI08/artists/CONNER%20portrait.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.interpc.fr/mapage/westernlands/psychedelicatessen_owner90.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 200px;" src="http://www.interpc.fr/mapage/westernlands/psychedelicatessen_owner90.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />If you didn't already know how much Bruce meant to me personally, the image at the head of my blog says it all. Bruce made startling and thoughtful images that reflected on consumerism and capitalism with a playful derision and incredible inventiveness and ingenuity. He single handedly revived the found footage film with his 1958 work ironically called <span style="font-style: italic;">A Movie</span> and went on to create some of the most important avant-garde films in America.<br /><br />We miss you Bruce.<br /><br />More to come on this later...Eli Horwatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05187714004486249366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-833737855227128085.post-1202067916114514492008-06-29T11:23:00.000-07:002008-06-29T11:27:13.049-07:002 New Offerings: Ikat381 and a new essay on Appropriation<object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/L55xPC_phtc&hl=en"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/L55xPC_phtc&hl=en" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" height="344" width="425"></embed></object><br /><br />Another gem from Ikat381.<br /><br />Below is an essay I wrote concerning early modes of cinematic appropriation focusing on Joseph Cornell and the Soviet Re-editors.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">Joseph Cornell and the Soviet Re-Editors: Two Modes of Early Cinematic Appropriation<br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;"> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span>“Everyone who has had in his hands a piece of film to be edited knows by <span style=""> </span>experience how neutral it remains, even though a part of a planned sequence, until <span style=""> </span>it is joined with another piece, when it suddenly acquires and conveys a sharper <span style=""> </span>and quite different meaning than that planned for it at the time of filming.”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:12;" >[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span>– Sergei Eisenstein</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span>Monuments to every moment,</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span>refuse of every moment: used</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span>cages for infinity. <a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:12;" >[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span>– Octavio Paz “Joseph Cornell: Objects and Apparitions” (1974)</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; line-height: 200%;" align="center"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>Found footage filmmaking “has been a central genre of cinematic exploration for the American avant-garde in the postwar period”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:12;" >[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> with a significant increase in practitioners across North America and <st1:place st="on">Europe</st1:place> since the 1980s<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:12;" >[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>. Though a substantial body of critical work has been presented on the technique, little time has been spent exploring the relationship between the two nascent forms of cinematic appropriation pioneered by the early Soviet film industry and by the Surrealist artist Joseph Cornell.<span style=""> </span>These two approaches both share the common impetus to transform cinematic works as a form of cultural resistance to dominant ideology and aesthetics. However, while the Soviet re-editors were most concerned with transforming Western films to introduce Marxist readings <i style="">into</i> the texts, in his film <i style="">Rose Hobart </i>(1936), Cornell was interested in both recapturing the technologically obsolete silent film and constructing his own non-narrative surrealist portrait. This essay explores the aesthetic, political, strategic and technological variations between Cornell’s <i style="">Rose Hobart </i>and the Soviet practice of transformation in an effort to further illuminate both the beginnings of appropriation in cinema and to understand the profound influence these two approaches have had on the current art practice of found footage filmmakers. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>The appropriation and transformation of extant film footage was a dominant feature of early Soviet cinema under the directive of the <span style="">USSR State Committee for Cinematography (Goskino). </span>Newsreel editors at the Export-Import division compiled disparate images for politically charged weekly news programs to screen to audiences across <st1:place st="on"><st1:country-region st="on">Russia</st1:country-region></st1:place>. The so-called Soviet “re-editors” were engaged in the ideological transformation of Western films—often charged with making cuts and changes to promote Marxist readings of imported films and also, with making alterations to Soviet films so that they were more saleable abroad.<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:12;" >[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Among these editors were four towering figures of Soviet filmmaking and montage: Lev Kuleshov, Esther Shub, Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov. Eisenstein first learned editing techniques while assisting Esther Shub in the re-editing of Fritz Lang’s <i style="">Dr. Mabuse </i>(1922).<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftn6" name="_ftnref6" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:12;" >[6]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Years later, after seeing <i style="">Battleship Potemkin </i>(1925),<i style=""> </i>Shub was inspired to create a seminal film in the cannon of the compilation documentary called <i style="">The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty </i>(1927)—transforming and incorporating images from Tzar Nicholas II’s court cameraman.<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftn7" name="_ftnref7" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:12;" >[7]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> It was the emergence of films like these that caused Vertov to suggest that “the history of Soviet cinema starts with experiments in newsreel film.”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftn8" name="_ftnref8" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:12;" >[8]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>Though the newsreel compilation preceded re-editing, the former’s status as a type of documentary is cause for its omission in relation to Cornell’s transformations. It should be noted however that the newsreel is the original pioneering site for found footage<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftn9" name="_ftnref9" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:12;" >[9]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> and that the use of footage for an early form of documentary has had an impact in the way it was used for re-editors. Critic Paul Arthur writes: <span class="hit"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="hit"><span style=""> </span>F</span><span class="hit"><span style="font-size:10;">ound</span></span><span style="font-size:10;"> <span class="hit">footage</span> was established as an integral element of exposition and argument, often serving as <span style=""> </span>illustration of a verbal reference or as a means of filling gaps in spatial continuity or didactic <span style=""> </span>evidence. Indeed, the recent outpouring of wartime newsreel compilations and military training <span style=""> </span>films had underscored the importance of <span class="hit">found</span> <span class="hit">footage</span> to the rhetorical strategies of corporate <span style=""> </span>and state-sponsored propaganda…<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftn10" name="_ftnref10" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:10;" >[10]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">The re-edited feature film has many similar features, though it holds no pretense towards documentary. As Arthur notes, the use of found footage as a powerful tool for government propaganda would become the primary impetus to transform western films.<span style=""> </span>It is worth noting here that the Surrealist film exhibition in which Rose<i style=""> Hobart </i>was first screened was called “Goofy Newsreels” in tribute perhaps to the earliest known form of found footage filmmaking. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>While the Soviet practice may employ the tactics of propaganda and even censorship—editors also infused sophisticated new reading into films, dismantling what they saw as capitalist propaganda and replacing it with their own pro-Marxist versions. These re-editors were charged with transforming western films for Soviet audiences both to reflect Marxist ideals and to confirm Soviet suspicions about western capitalism. Many western films were radically altered through sophisticated editing techniques, transformations in intertitles and complete excising of certain characters. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">Among the various changes re-editors were charged with making:</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10;"><span style=""> </span>happy endings would be removed as suggesting that one can be happy under <span style=""> </span>capitalism…"American endings" were generally believed to be forced upon artists by the capitalist <span style=""> </span>film industry'… '[f]at and virtuous people were turned into villains as a general rule…. characters' <span style=""> </span>nationality would be changed…<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftn11" name="_ftnref11" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:10;" >[11]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">These daily transformations developed in editors, not only a sophisticated ability to analyze the political meanings of films but also mastery in the area of montage. Discussing re-edited works alongside newsreel films may seem strange for the simple fact that re-editing does not initially strike one as a form of appropriation. Though the re-editors did not necessarily place their names on the films they altered, their transformation of films is itself a method of appropriation. The constellation of new ideas of form, interruption, appropriation and the reconstitution of meanings onto film objects become the foundation for the aesthetics and theories surrounding found footage filmmaking and may be seen as an application of Marxist aesthetics onto the new art form of the 20<sup>th</sup> century.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>Marxist critic Walter Benjamin’s body of work often touches upon ideas of reuse, reproduction and authorship which pertain to the appropriation of images. The dialectical image was Benjamin’s model for historiography in <i style="">The Arcades Project</i>, which critic Jeffrey Skoller describes: “Benjamin suggests that to explore what an object from the past means in the present is to turn that object into a text that has at its center an imagining subject who finds new possibilities for its meaning.”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftn12" name="_ftnref12" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:12;" >[12]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> In this way, we might understand the re-edited film as the re-imagined film—a malleable source text reconstructed to fit a reading. Esther Shub’s <i style="">Fall of the Romanov Dynasty</i> might be best understood as dialectical image making specifically in her exploration of the recent Tsarist past through the prism of the post-revolutionary <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">USSR</st1:place></st1:country-region>. Her interrogation of these images is also an interruption of their meaning. The materials were meant to not only to document the lives of the aristocracy, but to do so through their own eyes (and weren’t to be seen by laypersons); however Shub inverts this intention by uniting and juxtaposing the opulence of the Russian aristocracy with the indigence of the workers and peasants, thereby transforming the original intention of the film footage. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>In The United States, a young artist named Joseph Cornell would expand on the Soviet ideas with his poetic transformation of an early talkie picture called <i style="">East of Borneo</i> (1932).<span style=""> </span>Though Joseph Cornell’s status as a member of the Surrealist movement was never official, he was closely allied and influenced by Surrealist artists and collectors—showing his work in the first American exhibition of Surrealist art in 1932 at the Julien Levy Gallery in <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">New York</st1:place></st1:state>. As a practicing Christian Scientist, Cornell was put off by the Surrealist preoccupation with sexuality, however his work projected its own muted eroticism and romantic ideals with many of the same artistic strategies employed by Surrealists.<span style=""> </span>Cornell’s boxes, romantic museums, archives and dossiers composed of appropriated objects from the detritus and found materials of everyday life were transformed by his personal cosmology into brilliant ensembles. The subject of these assemblages was frequently women—most of whom were film actresses. An atypical cinephile, Cornell often disliked the films featuring the women who enchanted him and transformed their images through his own wish-insights into their personas. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>All of these features and strategies would make way for his pioneering film <i style="">Rose Hobart</i>, first screened in 1936 at the Julien Levy Gallery to a room full of Surrealists and resulting in the violent envy of one member of the audience; Salvador Dali.<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftn13" name="_ftnref13" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:12;" >[13]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> The film was composed of images from an early talkie recovered by Cornell from a production archive selling the film for its nitrate stock. Cornell’s film, like many of his assemblages, is a tribute to an actress, Rose Hobart, the star of <i style="">East of Borneo</i>,<i style=""> </i>whom Cornell transforms into a very different kind of heroine. The film was a culmination of Cornell’s appropriation of images into cinematic form which would leave a rich legacy for future cinematic appropriators and found footage filmmakers like Bruce Conner, Ken Jacobs, David Rimmer and Craig Baldwin.<span style=""> </span>While the Soviets were predominantly interested in ideological transformation that was hidden<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftn14" name="_ftnref14" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:12;" >[14]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> within the narrative of a film, Joseph Cornell would highlight his alterations by conspicuously slowing the footage down, replacing the original soundtrack, altering the color (with blue tinted glass) and constructing his own idealized and poetic homage to the main actress, Rose Hobart. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; line-height: 200%;" align="center"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; line-height: 200%;" align="center">Narrative, Montage and Interruption</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>While the Soviet re-editors and newsreel creators were attempting to produce or maintain narrative, Cornell’s collage film pursued what P. Adams Sitney calls a “surrealist narrative”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftn15" name="_ftnref15" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:12;" >[15]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> which shatters logical narrative progressions utilizing the language of associative images and the grammar of fragmentation. The features which unite these two approaches appear in the idea of montage. Critic Yuri Tsivian suggests </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">that the innovative Soviet editor Viktor Shklovsky:</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10;"><span style=""> </span>“understood art as a special way of assembling things and enjoyed watching the whole change its <span style=""> </span>meaning as he rearranged its parts on his editing table. For a theorist, this process confirmed what <span style=""> </span>Kuleshov (pioneer re-editor..) had earlier shown about cinema and what Tynianov had found <span style=""> </span>about the language of poetry in 1923, namely, that ‘meanings’ are generated through juxtaposition <span style=""> </span>and foregrounding:”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftn16" name="_ftnref16" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:10;" >[16]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">Numerous Soviet montage theorists suggest that montage is essentially the act of assembling meaning through the technique of juxtaposition.<span style=""> </span>Eisenstein suggested that cinema should follow the methodology of language rather than theater and painting because it would allow “wholly new concepts or ideas to arise from the combination of two concrete denotations of two concrete objects…”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftn17" name="_ftnref17" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:12;" >[17]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> If we accept Eisenstein’s characterization of film as “a language…in which the real is used as an element of a discourse”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftn18" name="_ftnref18" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:12;" >[18]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> this language of montage is similar to the language of collage and assemblage, though it does not immediately suggest materials culled from disparate sources. The primary difference might be in the Soviet use of montage to illustrate rational associations for the purposes of narrative progression while Cornell was interested in montage that illustrated the logic of dreams. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>Interestingly, Cornell does include one very famous sequence of narrative cohesion, if it might be called that, surrounding one of the major motifs of <i style="">Rose Hobart</i>. The film opens with a crowd gazing into the sky, which critic Jodi Hauptman suggests represents a kind of “stargazing” befitting not astral bodies but actual movie stars—like Rose Hobart.<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftn19" name="_ftnref19" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:12;" >[19]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style=""> </span>This stargazing culminates in an eclipse at the end of the film, in which “just after the moon completes its passage in front of the sun, the sun appears to drop into a pool of water.”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftn20" name="_ftnref20" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:12;" >[20]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> This editing sleight-of-hand establishes one of the most compelling and imitated techniques in found footage filmmaking—the conjoining of film fragments which when put together indicate a narrative cause-and-effect but are nonetheless quite illogical.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>Hal Foster describes Surrealist collage as “a disruptive montage of conductive psychic signifiers (i.e., of fantasmatic scenarios and enigmatic events) referred to the unconscious.”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftn21" name="_ftnref21" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:12;" >[21]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Cornell uses major tropes of <i style="">East of Borneo </i>and mines them for their associative and metaphorical properties. As Hauptman illustrates in her brilliant book on Cornell and cinema, “the hysterical body of the woman is associated with and echoed metonymically by another site of otherness: the ‘primitive’ island kingdom”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftn22" name="_ftnref22" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:12;" >[22]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> in which <st1:place st="on"><i style="">Borneo</i></st1:place><i style=""> </i>is set. Hauptman goes on to explore other metonymic or metaphorical images: an exploding volcano becomes a violent representation of male sexuality and a disembodied object from which to understand the Prince who tries to seduce her, and the island becomes “a double of <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Hobart</st1:place></st1:city>.” However these logical associations are interrupted by seemingly random images which punctuate the film. Foster demonstrates that the language of montage frequently features arguments about “disruption” or “interruption.” For Walter Benjamin, critic Susan Buck-Morss suggests, “the technique of montage had ‘special, perhaps even total rights’ as a progressive form because it ‘interrupts the context into which it is inserted’ and thus ‘counteracts illusion.’”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftn23" name="_ftnref23" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:12;" >[23]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Here is the site of one of the major differences between how the spectator watches a film by a Soviet re-editor and how Cornell’s film is received. While the re-editor attempts to similar continuity within a text, Cornell attempts to create disruption. Critic Fatimah Rony describes some of these features in <i style="">Rose Hobart</i>: </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10;"><span style=""> </span>The actress wanders through a nighttime dreamscape: so many unexplained events, the sublime <span style=""> </span>mystery of an eclipse, the concentrated look of the exotic Prince; but nothing ever gets going. All <span style=""> </span>meanings are thwarted, and all linear narrative and causality is deliberately defied.<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftn24" name="_ftnref24" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:10;" >[24]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">The shattering of narrative logic, the disruption of continuity and the conjoining of associative images distinctly indicates the province of not only of Surrealist montage but of a frequent interruption of meaning and narrative—forcing the spectator to reorient herself throughout the 19 minute film.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>The “wise and wicked game” of wit that Sergei Eisenstein refers to in discussion of the re-editors has no place in the aesthetics of Joseph Cornell who uses the rhetoric of dream, portraiture and Surrealist collage in his film.<span style=""> </span>Cornell achieves these fractured images by juxtaposing fragments which have no coherent “logical” meaning. This radical juxtaposition of images for the production of alternative meanings was also a strategy employed by the Surrealists in numerous instances and prominently by collagist Max Ernst. Cornell’s encounter with Ernst’s collages was the inspiration for his entire career—turning him into a devout, albeit weary, disciple of Surrealism. It was Ernst’s <i style="">La Femme 100 têtes</i>, a Surrealist collage novel composed of fragments from “Victorian steel engravings from old catalogues, magazines, and pulp novels”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftn25" name="_ftnref25" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:12;" >[25]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> that would capture Cornell’s attention and entice him to begin using his own vast collection of materials in his work. Surrealist games like the <i style="">Exquisite Corpse </i>which sought to produce radical combinations of images, or the jarring and radical collages which in Max Ernst’s words created the “coupling of two realities, irreconcilable in appearance, on a place which apparently does not suit them” <a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftn26" name="_ftnref26" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:12;" >[26]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> were all an influence on Cornell’s assemblages.<span style=""> </span><span style="line-height: 200%;font-family:Arial;font-size:10;" ><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>Beyond Cornell’s achievement in developing a new form of cinematic appropriation in <i style="">Rose </i>Hobart, it is also important to consider the intricate montage he constructs for the film, characterized by P. Adams Sitney here: </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10;"><span style=""> </span>Cornell’s montage is startlingly original. Nothing like it occurs in the history of cinema until thirty <span style=""> </span>years later. The deliberate mismatching of shots, the reduction of conversations to images of the <span style=""> </span>actress without corresponding shots of her interlocutor, and the sudden shifts of location were so <span style=""> </span>daring that even the most sophisticated viewers would have seen the film as inept rather than <span style=""> </span>brilliant…</span><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">.</span> <span style="font-size:10;">The editing of <i style="">Rose Hobart</i> creates a double impression: it presents the aspect of a <span style=""> </span>randomly broken, oddly scrambled, and hastily repaired feature film that no longer makes sense; <span style=""> </span>yet at the same time, each of its curiously reset fractures astonishes us with new meaning. </span><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftn27" name="_ftnref27" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:12;" >[27]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">Sitney’s authoritative defense of the film’s editing is important. <i style="">Rose Hobart </i>is frequently discussed only for its contribution to the idea of found footage film and cinematic appropriation rather than for the merits of the incredible montage the inexperienced Cornell composed. The language of the film may be appropriated film fragments, but the grammar creates a sophisticated interplay of those fragments and constitutes a highly original development in film montage. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; line-height: 200%;" align="center"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; line-height: 200%;" align="center">Transformation, Appropriation and Cultural Resistance </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>The difference identified in the two aforementioned approaches towards appropriation relates to whether or not a transformation works within the system of the material appropriated. In other words, is the artist appropriating both images <i style="">and </i>structure? In Cornell’s case the answer clearly is no—as evinced in the narrative disruption, the elimination of sound and the break from <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Hollywood</st1:place></st1:city> film grammar. In the case of the Soviet re-editors, the transformation occurs clandestinely—camouflaging changes in the source material and overwhelmingly repeating the grammar of the original text. Though avant-garde cinema is frequently discussed as being inevitably in opposition to <st1:place st="on">Hollywood</st1:place> cinema, this bifurcation has both aesthetic and political dimensions. The Soviet transformation focuses on politics while Cornell’s work would register most overtly as an aesthetic alteration—though this aesthetic transformation arguably has political dimensions. Cornell’s approach befits an assemblage artist, referring to his film as “tapestry in action.”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftn28" name="_ftnref28" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:12;" >[28]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>Soviet film transformations had many incarnations and utilized a variety of source materials which extended from altering contemporary stories to, in the following case, introducing varying attitudes towards history. Eisenstein gives an anecdote to explain just how this was performed with the German film <i style="">Danton </i>(1924) which dramatized events during the French Revolution. Eisenstein explains a transformation that dramatically alters the film: </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span><span style="font-size:10;">Camille Desmoulins is condemned to the guillotine. Greatly agitated, Danton rushes to <span style=""> </span>Robespierre, who turns aside and slowly wipes away a tear. The sub-title said, approximately, 'In <span style=""> </span>the name of freedom I had to sacrifice a friend ...' Fine. But who could have guessed that in the <span style=""> </span>German original, Danton, represented as an idler, a petticoat-chaser, a splendid chap and the only <span style=""> </span>positive figure in the midst of evil characters, that this Danton ran to the evil Robespierre and ... <span style=""> </span>spat in his face? And that it was this spit that Robespierre wiped from his face with a <span style=""> </span>handkerchief? And that the title indicated Robespierre's hatred of Danton, a hate that in the end of <span style=""> </span>the film motivates the condemnation of Jannings-Danton to the guillotine?!<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftn29" name="_ftnref29" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:10;" >[29]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">The re-editors turned Danton’s spit into a “tear of remorse” through minor alterations which transformed the meaning of the film to reflect positively on Robespierre. This kind of transformation does not only interject a Marxist reading, it in effect creates a kind of revisionist history sympathetic to their view of the French revolution. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>Critic Hal Foster makes a case that appropriators find the locus of their power in their ability to reconstitute meanings onto signs and disrupt the “monopoly of the code”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftn30" name="_ftnref30" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:12;" >[30]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> by an elite of cultural producers. Foster invokes Baudrillard’s assertion that “semiotic privilege represents… the ultimate stage of domination”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftn31" name="_ftnref31" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:12;" >[31]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> and makes a case that appropriation can disrupt the bourgeoisie’s “mastery of the process of signification.”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftn32" name="_ftnref32" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:12;" >[32]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> In this way, we might understand appropriation as a means of cultural resistance through the attempt to subvert meanings and control signification. The appropriator can impose new meaning or disrupt accepted meaning through inventive transformation.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>As the Soviet editors from Goskino had been given ideological control over the import of Western films by the government, it may appear difficult to justify their transformations as cultural resistance unless we consider the global cinema of this era as dominated by pro-capitalist ideology. If we observe the Soviet re-editing experiment as a way of subverting the pro-capitalist cultural domination of Western films, the idea of cultural resistance could be accepted on a national scale. The Soviet control of signification, however, did not allow for an unchanged referent (i.e.<span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:Elijah%20Horwatt" datetime="2008-06-25T19:08">,</ins></span> the original film) alongside the altered film for the spectator to compare the transformation—unlike Joseph Cornell who uses a film which was widely released in The United States. In this way the re-edited films of the Soviet era also posses a sinister side—a form of cultural engineering, censorship or propaganda. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>In the case of Joseph Cornell, the appropriation of <i style="">East of Borneo</i> represents a highly successful example of overthrowing the ‘monopoly of signification.’ For its time, <i style="">Borneo </i>was a major <st1:place st="on">Hollywood</st1:place> feature, but has not endured as a significant film and is most known as the source material for Cornell’s <i style="">Rose Hobart</i>. Cornell’s titling of <i style="">Rose Hobart </i>implies an attempt to create a kind of portraiture which eviscerates the traces of plot and channels the actual actress from the character she plays. This kind of séance of the living-being from the character may be the very key to understanding Cornell’s initial impetus for transformation of film materials. Critic Jodi Hauptman suggests that Cornell’s shadow box portraits are rhetorically similar to the language of the “adoring fan”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftn33" name="_ftnref33" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:12;" >[33]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> seeking to pay tribute to actresses behind films Cornell often loathed. Critic Diane Waldman writes, “Cornel disliked the introduction of sound into film, stating that the talkies lacked the ability to capture ‘the profound and suggestive power of the silent film to evoke an ideal world of beauty.’”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftn34" name="_ftnref34" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:12;" >[34]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Cornell’s transformation can then be understood as an attempt to recapture the mysterious beauty of the silent cinema lost to sound, and a condensing of all the elements that he found most intriguing in films—faces, expressions, gestures, scene fade-outs and monochromatic film.<span style=""> </span>Additionally we see Cornell disperse with the element he found most oppressive—dialogue and plot. All of these strategies imply a resistance on Cornell’s part, to give in to contemporary cinema by returning to certain older aesthetic models. Ironically, Cornell’s transformation is one that looks both forward and backward—back towards the silent cinema he fetishizes, and forward towards the non-narrative and lyrical filmmaking style that defined the North American avant-garde in the second half of the 20<sup>th</sup> century. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; line-height: 200%;" align="center">Conclusion: The Legacy of Cornell and the Soviet Re-Editors</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>To conclude, it seems appropriate to briefly touch upon the legacy these two approaches have left for avant-garde cinema. While found footage films in the last half century have frequently featured heavy cross-pollination between the two approaches discussed above, many explicitly borrow from traditions pioneered by either Cornell or the Soviet re-editors. Contemporary found footage filmmaker Craig Baldwin might be described as utilizing both approaches in his left-wing pseudo-historical documentaries which utilize a vast array of images as source material for their associative properties. Perhaps the most well known avant-garde found footage film, <i style="">A Movie </i>(1958) by Bruce Conner, features sequences which attempt to construct narrative in a highly surreal fashion similar to Cornell’s editing sleight-of-hand with the “falling eclipse” in <i style="">Rose Hobart</i>. This famous sequence is explained by critic William Wees: “A submarine captain seems to see a scantily dressed woman though his periscope and responds by firing a torpedo which produces a nuclear explosion followed by huge waves ridden by surfboard riders.”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftn35" name="_ftnref35" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:12;" >[35]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style=""> </span>Each new scene comes from a disparate film but has a surreal narrative concatenating the scenes. A direct descendent of the Soviet re-editing style is observable in <i style="">Can Dialectics Break Bricks </i>(1973) by Situationist filmmaker René Viénet.<span style=""> </span>The film appropriates images from a Korean kung-fu film and interjects a Marxist narrative about a group of disenfranchised factory workers and their battle with wealthy bureaucrats through Hegelian dialectics—all achieved through the re-dubbing of the film’s soundtrack. Ken Jacobs cites Cornell as one of his primary influences and even calls his film <i style="">A GOOD NIGHT FOR THE MOVIES: The Fourth Of July by Charles Ives by Ken Jacobs </i>“a sequel to <span class="hit"><i style="">Rose Hobart</i></span>.”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftn36" name="_ftnref36" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:12;" >[36]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style=""> </span>Cornell’s mentorship of both Larry Jordan and Stan Brakhage, (whom he commissioned to make several of his film ideas) is also said to have guided the two young filmmakers towards their brilliant film careers. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style=""> </span>Together, the approaches pioneered by the Soviet re-editors and Joseph Cornell seem to contain the foundations for some of the most radical manipulations of film footage in the history of the technique. The Soviet’s initiate a practice which offers appropriators the ability to facilitate cultural resistance towards dominant cinema and through wit, deconstruct and recreate footage so that it actually argues against its own claims—what some have called <i style="">media jujitsu</i>. Cornell moves from the nationalistic political arena of the Soviets towards a more personal conviction—which seeks to use film as a found object.<span style=""> </span>Cornell’s transformation attempts to break through the façade of the cinema screen and portray the actress within it—to channel her as if through a dream from within the contrivances of a plot.<span style=""> </span>Together, these two approaches leave a rich legacy and continue to teach artists about a form of filmmaking which requires little more than a flatbed and ingenuity. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <div style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><br /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%"> <!--[endif]--> <div style="" id="ftn1"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:10;" >[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Eisenstein, Sergei. “Through Theater to Cinema.” in <i style="">Film Form: Essays in Film Theory</i>. Ed. Jay Leyda. Harvest Books: <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">New York</st1:place></st1:state>, 1949: 10</p> </div> <div style="" id="ftn2"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:10;" >[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Paz, Octavio. “JOSEPH CORNELL Objects and Apparitions in <i style="">Thories and Documents of Contemporary Art. </i>Ed. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz. <st1:placetype st="on">University</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename st="on">California</st1:placename> Press: <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">London</st1:place></st1:city>, 1996: 509</p> </div> <div style="" id="ftn3"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:10;" >[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Skoller, Jeffrey. <i style=""><span style=""> </span>Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film. </i><span style=""> </span><st1:placetype st="on">University</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename st="on">Minnesota</st1:placename> Press: <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Minneapolis</st1:city></st1:place>, 2005: 7. </p> </div> <div style="" id="ftn4"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:10;" >[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Wees, William C. “From Compilation to Collage: The Found Footage Films of Arthur Lipsett: The Martin Walsh Memorial Lecture 2007.” <span class="journtitle"><i style="">Canadian Journal of Film Studies</i>, </span><span class="gotoissue">16:2 (Fall 2007): 4</span></p> </div> <div style="" id="ftn5"> <p class="MsoNormal"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:12;" >[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <span class="hit"><span style="font-size:10;">Tsivian</span></span><span class="author"><span style="font-size:10;">, Yuri.</span></span><span class="title"><span style="font-size:10;"> “The Wise and Wicked Game: Re-editing and Soviet film Culture of the 1920s” </span></span><span style="font-size:10;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span class="journtitle"><i style="">Film History</i></span> <span class="gotoissue"><span style=""> </span>8:3 (1996): </span>327</p> </div> <div style="" id="ftn6"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:10;" >[6]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Yutkevitch, Sergei. “Teenage Artists of the Revolution.” <i style="">Cinema and Revoltuion</i>. <st1:place st="on">Luda</st1:place> and Jean Schnitzer and Marcel Martin, Eds. <i style="">Cinema in Revoltuion: The Heroic Era of the Soviet Film </i>(London: Secker & Warburg, 1973): 16</p> </div> <div style="" id="ftn7"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftnref7" name="_ftn7" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:10;" >[7]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Leyda, Jay. <i style="">Films Beget Films</i>. Hill and Wang: <st1:place st="on"><st1:state st="on">New York</st1:state></st1:place>, 1964: 24-25</p> </div> <div style="" id="ftn8"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftnref8" name="_ftn8" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:10;" >[8]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Vertov, Dziga. “In Defense of Newsreel.” <i style="">Kino Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov</i>. Ed. Annette Michelson.<span style=""> </span><st1:placetype st="on">University</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename st="on">California</st1:placename> Press: <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">London</st1:city></st1:place>, 1984: 147</p> </div> <div style="" id="ftn9"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftnref9" name="_ftn9" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:10;" >[9]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> According to Jay Leyda, this tradition can be traced back as early as 1898. See Leyda: 13</p> </div> <div style="" id="ftn10"> <p class="MsoNormal"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftnref10" name="_ftn10" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:10;" >[10]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> Arthur, Paul. <span class="title"><span style=""> </span>“The Status of Found Footage” </span><span class="journtitle">Spectator - The <st1:place st="on"><st1:placetype st="on">University</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename st="on">Southern California</st1:placename></st1:place> Journal of Film and Television</span> <span class="gotoissue">20:1 (Fall 1999-Winter 2000)</span>: 58-59<o:p></o:p></span></p> </div> <div style="" id="ftn11"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftnref11" name="_ftn11" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:10;" >[11]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Tsivian: 329</p> </div> <div style="" id="ftn12"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftnref12" name="_ftn12" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:10;" >[12]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Skoller: 5</p> </div> <div style="" id="ftn13"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftnref13" name="_ftn13" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:10;" >[13]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Dali claimed to Breton that “My idea for a film is exactly that, and I was going to propose it to someone who would pay to have it made…I never wrote it or told anyone, but it is as <i style="">if</i> he had stolen it.” Quoted in<span style=""> </span>Solomon, Deborah. <i style="">Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell</i>. Farrar, Straus and Giroux: <st1:place st="on"><st1:state st="on">New York</st1:state></st1:place>, 1997: 89</p> </div> <div style="" id="ftn14"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftnref14" name="_ftn14" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:10;" >[14]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Overwhelmingly these Soviet transformations were made so that audiences were unaware of them—however numerous cases of “private screenings” amongst editors highlighted in comedic ways, how these transformations occurred. </p> </div> <div style="" id="ftn15"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftnref15" name="_ftn15" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:10;" >[15]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Sitney, P. Adams. “The Cinematic Gaze of Joseph Cornell.” From <i style="">Joseph Cornell. </i>Ed. Kynaston McShine. <st1:placetype st="on">Museum</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename st="on">Modern</st1:placename> Art: <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">New York</st1:place></st1:state>, 1980: 71</p> </div> <div style="" id="ftn16"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftnref16" name="_ftn16" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:10;" >[16]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <span class="hit">Tsivian</span><span class="author">:</span> 338</p> </div> <div style="" id="ftn17"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftnref17" name="_ftn17" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:10;" >[17]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Eisenstein, Sergei. “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form.” in<span style=""> </span><i style="">Film Form: Essays in Film Theory</i>. Ed. Jay Leyda.<span style=""> </span>Harvest Books: <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">New York</st1:place></st1:state>, 1949: 50</p> </div> <div style="" id="ftn18"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftnref18" name="_ftn18" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:10;" >[18]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Ulmer, Gregory L. “The Object of Post-Criticism.” In <i style="">The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture</i>. Ed. Hal Foster. Bay Press: <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Seattle</st1:place></st1:city>, 1983: 85</p> </div> <div style="" id="ftn19"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftnref19" name="_ftn19" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:10;" >[19]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Hauptman, Jodi. <i style="">Joseph Cornell: Stargazing in the Cinema</i>. <st1:placename st="on">Yale</st1:placename> <st1:placetype st="on">University</st1:placetype> Press: <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">New Haven</st1:place></st1:city>, 1999: 103</p> </div> <div style="" id="ftn20"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftnref20" name="_ftn20" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:10;" >[20]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Ibid. </p> </div> <div style="" id="ftn21"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftnref21" name="_ftn21" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:10;" >[21]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Foster, Hal. <i style="">Compulsive Beauty</i>. M.I.T. Press: <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Cambridge</st1:place></st1:city>, 1993: 81</p> </div> <div style="" id="ftn22"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftnref22" name="_ftn22" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:10;" >[22]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Hauptman: 97</p> </div> <div style="" id="ftn23"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftnref23" name="_ftn23" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:10;" >[23]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Buck-Morss, Susan. <i style="">The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the <st1:place st="on">Arcades</st1:place> Project. </i><span style=""> </span><st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Cambridge</st1:city></st1:place>: MIT Press, 1989: 67</p> </div> <div style="" id="ftn24"> <p class="MsoNormal"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftnref24" name="_ftn24" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:10;" >[24]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> <span class="author">Rony, Fatimah Tobing</span><span class="title"> The Quick and the Dead: Surrealism and the Found Ethnographic Footage Films of "Bontoc Eulogy” and “Mother Dao: The Turtlelike” </span><span class="journtitle"><i style="">Camera Obscura</i></span> <span class="gotoissue">18:1:52 (2003): 132</span><o:p></o:p></span></p> </div> <div style="" id="ftn25"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftnref25" name="_ftn25" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:10;" >[25]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Solomon: 57</p> </div> <div style="" id="ftn26"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftnref26" name="_ftn26" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:10;" >[26]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Hauptman: 33</p> </div> <div style="" id="ftn27"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftnref27" name="_ftn27" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:10;" >[27]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Sitney: 75 </p> </div> <div style="" id="ftn28"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftnref28" name="_ftn28" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:10;" >[28]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Hauptman: 87</p> </div> <div style="" id="ftn29"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftnref29" name="_ftn29" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:10;" >[29]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Eisenstein. “Through Theater to Cinema.”: 11 </p> </div> <div style="" id="ftn30"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftnref30" name="_ftn30" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:10;" >[30]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Foster, Hal. <i style="">Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics</i>.<span style=""> </span>Bay Press: Port Townsend, 1985: 173. </p> </div> <div style="" id="ftn31"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftnref31" name="_ftn31" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:10;" >[31]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Ibid. </p> </div> <div style="" id="ftn32"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftnref32" name="_ftn32" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:10;" >[32]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Ibid. </p> </div> <div style="" id="ftn33"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftnref33" name="_ftn33" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:10;" >[33]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Hauptman: 53</p> </div> <div style="" id="ftn34"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftnref34" name="_ftn34" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:10;" >[34]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Waldman, Diane. <i style="">Joseph Cornell: Master of Dreams</i>. Harry N Abrams Inc: <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">New York</st1:place></st1:state>: 2002:121</p> </div> <div style="" id="ftn35"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftnref35" name="_ftn35" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:10;" >[35]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Wees, William C. <i style="">Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films</i>. <st1:place st="on"><st1:state st="on">New York</st1:state></st1:place>: Anthology Film Archives, 1993: 14</p> </div> <div style="" id="ftn36"> <p class="MsoNormal"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=833737855227128085&postID=120206791611451449#_ftnref36" name="_ftn36" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10;"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:10;" >[36]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size:10;"> <span class="author">Jacobs, Ken. “</span><span class="title">Painted Air: The Joys and Sorrows of Evanescent Cinema.” </span><span class="journtitle"><i style="">Millennium Film Journal</i></span> <span class="gotoissue">43-44 (Summer 2005): 53</span><o:p></o:p></span></p> </div> </div> </div></div>Eli Horwatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05187714004486249366noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-833737855227128085.post-26476571485971311942008-06-13T07:05:00.000-07:002008-06-13T07:45:42.659-07:00Machinima and Up and Coming WorkMy article detailing machinima and the avant-garde can now be read online <a href="http://www.cineaction.ca/issue73sample.htm">here</a>. It may seem strange to lump found footage film and machinima together as their differences appear substantial. I've found that while machinima only appropriates the game engine program (and the images are created by the player) the form frequently has the same critical relationship to the material it appropriates and similarly offers an inexpensive means of making film.<br /><br />Right now I'm working on a very time consuming and fragmented form of Recycled Cinema using 12-18 frame clips of people talking and synchronizing them into melodies. Though it can be deeply frustrating at times, the experience has revealed how speech is tonal and when isolated can become musical. I've always been very attracted to Martin Arnold's <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXgjugI-iFU&feature=related">method of repetition </a>to reconstitute meaning through fragmention, and it is a truly fun exercise to do on your own, but am trying to take his idea and isolate it from any semblance of narrative or meaning into a purely rhythmic collage of sound.<br /><br />Most of my reading and writing right now is concerned with how Surrealists theorized found objects. The principal figures I'm looking at, Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp were not officially inaugurated by Andre Breton into the Surrealist group but made some of the most interesting contributions to found object art with their assemblages and readymades.<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.participations.org/volume%201/issue%203/1_03_s4.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 200px;" src="http://www.participations.org/volume%201/issue%203/1_03_s4.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />Hal Foster's writing has been helpful, specifically the offbeat <span style="font-style: italic;">Compulsive Beauty</span> which gives a very unusual treatment of Surrealism which largely abstains from the routine assessments we're familiar with. Perhaps it is Foster's willingness to look at the work and tendencies rather than Breton's public proclamations that make it so interesting. Also, I'm slightly puzzled by the density and impenetrability of Foster's <span style="font-style: italic;">Recordings<span style="font-style: italic;">: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics</span></span>, but some passages and sections have been incredibly useful. I'm largely referring to how Foster suggests appropriation's greatest power is in recoding signs--in forcing encoders of messages to relinquish control. Foster argues that the control of meaning in artworks through appropriation is one of the most powerful forms of cultural resistance.<br /><br />I'm writing right now on the split approaches of Soviet re-editors (which I've previously discussed) and Cornell's found footage film <span style="font-style: italic;">Rose Hobart </span>when it comes to the strategies both employ. If anyone has tips of good books to look at Surrealist appropriation, shoot them my way.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.nga.gov.au/international/catalogue/Images/LRG/44875.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 200px;" src="http://www.nga.gov.au/international/catalogue/Images/LRG/44875.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>Eli Horwatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05187714004486249366noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-833737855227128085.post-52829445624024077922008-05-05T14:19:00.000-07:002008-05-05T14:21:37.789-07:002 Films by Eric Hill AKA videoheadboy<object width="425" height="355"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/mCXRX9VE7po&hl=en"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/mCXRX9VE7po&hl=en" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355"></embed></object><br /><br /><object width="425" height="355"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/qFIhwPqPKig&hl=en"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/qFIhwPqPKig&hl=en" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355"></embed></object>Eli Horwatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05187714004486249366noreply@blogger.com0